Best European Fiction? France is so far out it's back in

You tell me - how surprising is it that, in Aleksandar Hemon's anthology "Best European Fiction 2012," which includes one "best" story of the year (the "year" appears to be the year the story is available in English, not the year of original publication, which seems to range through the past decade) from every (I think) European country and even language group (e.g., one each from England, Scotland, Wales) the most straightforward, simple, and conventional story in the first half of the book is the story from: France! What happened to all the sons and daughters of Robbe-Grillet and Roland Barthes? What happened to all the metacritics and hypertext addicts, the constructionists and the deconstructionists, the postmodernists and the even the existentialists? Helas! What we get is a rather pleasant story titled something like Juergan, the Best Son-in-Law in the World, about a young woman and her husband devoted to her mother (living in Bavaria) who help her out when she's lost her cat (yes, there's a little twist at the end, as well as an author's note that she wrote this story as catalog text for a photo exhibit) - and yet - I think Hemon's selection of this story to represent France in 2012, alongside a Slovakian stories written as one long and indiscernible paragraph, is a bit of a hyperjoke in itself - France is so far out that it's back in.